Only two of the six beams remain to hold up the Dark Tower, locus of a billion overlapping universes and centre point of all possible worlds. Gunslinger Roland, an arthritic cross between Clint Eastwood in a blanket and all possible heroes, is still searching for a way to prevent its fall, while demon-inhabited Susannah is holed up in an alternative 1990s New York preparing to give birth to the Child Mordred... Meanwhile an author called Stephen King, in yet another version of America - this time the 70s - may hold an answer or pose a threat. So while Father Callahan (on loan from Salem's Lot) goes chasing after Susannah, the young Mr King gets a visit from his own most famous character. In best metanarrative tradition, King namechecks earlier works while borrowing freely from other writers. The penultimate book in the Dark Tower sequence, it will keep those waiting for the final instalment happy.

The Year of Our War, by Steph Swainston (Gollancz, £9.99)

God is on holiday and the FourLands are ruled by an emperor with the aid of 50 immortals, one of whom is Jant, a drug-addicted angel and one-time street kid. Jant carries the emperor's orders to the other immortals and to the kings, princes and governors of the FourLands. He does this because immortality can be taken away at any time. Together the 50 immortals make up the Circle; their job is to help mortals fight the Insects, ant-like creatures who switch between dimensions. Unfortunately the Insects are winning, Jant is losing his battle against addiction and most of the Circle are more concerned with sex, violence and squabbling with each other than with doing their job. The Year of Our War occasionally loses its way, but Steph Swainston has hidden a study of guilt and addiction inside a novel about sexual politics, and wrapped the lot in some of the weirdest and best fantasy written in recent years. A stunning debut.

City of Saints and Madmen, by Jeff VanderMeer (Tor, £12.99)

A minor artist in the city of Ambergris, Martin Lake spends his days drinking and lazily pastiching himself with collages cut from cheap magazines, until he receives an invitation to a beheading. Ambergris is riven by factions for and against the greatness of the city's late despot and composer Voss Bender. It has become impossible even to collect one's post without declaring allegiance to the greens or the reds (named for Bender's favourite and least favourite colour, respectively). At first Lake thinks the invitation a cruel joke set up by friends; he soon realises that it is anything but... And what he sees turns him from a minor hack into a guilt-ridden genius and the city's greatest painter. City of Saints and Madmen draws together all Jeff VanderMeer's Ambergris novellas, including The Transformation of Martin Lake , which won the World Fantasy award. This is fiction to stand alongside that of Calvino and Borges.

Dead Lines, by Greg Bear (HarperCollins, £17.99)

Greg Bear is one of SF's most interesting writers - which makes Dead Lines something of a disappointment. Every great consumer product brings its own anxiety; with mobile phones, it's the possibility that using them may rot our brains. Until Arpad Kreisler creates the Trans, that is. This is the ultimate 21st-century consumer fantasy: a mobile telephone that costs nothing to run and works for a year without recharging. Unfortunately it comes with some major side effects - like seeing the dead, screwing with space/time and manifesting as real whatever guilt you might be carrying around. As Peter Russell has a failed marriage, used to make porn films and lost one of his children to a serial killer, he's got plenty of guilt to manifest and a dead daughter keen to embrace him. Dead Lines remains uncertain whether or not to become a full-blown horror novel and bends badly under the weight of its own significance.